Searching the Past to Understand the Future

12/28/2012

Being Me 4: Resentment

The first time I lost weight I had a somewhat incorrect interpretation of what it would mean to no longer be the fat kid. Life for most people is pretty much event based. We all think that when A happens then B and B means that I have arrived. So when you’re the fat kid who gets picked on you think things like, “When I lose weight everyone will like me.”

The harsh truth of life (or, maybe not, depending) is that nobody chooses to like or dislike you based on your weight. Well, most people don’t. Some people are shallow assholes like that.

Still, I did not know that. Or if I did know that I chose not to believe it. That might be one of those six one way, half a dozen the others sort of things.

With my goal in mind I worked obsessively. I dropped 110 pounds in about nine months. If my weight went down by less than 3 pounds a week I started to worry. If anyone presented me with food outside of my narrow limits I got mad (including birthday cake, might I add. On my own birthday). I also worked out five or six days a week, generally by riding my bike twenty to thirty miles.

I’m naturally athletic to a certain extent. I’m coordinated, I’m physically capable, and I can generally pick up a sport pretty easily. I’m never the best player in any given game, but I’m usually not the worst by a wide margin. That said, endurance athletics really aren’t my thing. Once I get in the groove I can take a bike for 20 to 30 miles pretty easily. I just can’t do it fast. And by the end of my rides I’d be huffing and puffing. This, of course, is the goal of exercise.

Everyone needs motivation when there’s a little ways to go and they just want to die. When I needed motivation I thought about my friends. Specifically, I imagined that my friends were laughing at me and telling me that I’d fail. My motivation came from wanting to say, “Fuck you, I did it in spite of you,” to my friends.

That’s…that’s a little weird.

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Like I said, life is pretty much event based. That isn’t really a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just a thing. It’s an inevitability of the human condition and the way we think about time. We want to see a beginning, a middle, and an end so we invent them. Then we tell stories about them.

My events, being the social outcast loner type, were all of the events that said, “You’re accepted,” or the seemingly far more common, “You’re not accepted.” Generally the future ones were places where I could, theoretically, finally say, “I have arrived and people like me,” and the past ones were all places where that had explicitly not happened.

I didn’t really get invited to parties. In high school I found that out because I’d hear people talking about their parties the following week. In the few years after high school I thought I’d left that behind. Then I started hanging out with a bunch of people who I met at church and hung out with at least two to three times a week at officially sanctioned events. I thought we were really good friends. Then it gradually dawned on me that I was still the odd man out. I learned about it the same way I learned about it in high school: by hearing people talk about stuff they did when I wasn’t around.

It hurt. I didn’t know why I wasn’t being included and, more importantly, I didn’t know how to ask. To this day I don’t know why I wasn’t included in things. I don’t think it’s because they didn’t like me.

I do know, however, that when I needed motivation to accomplish my own things I was able to summon more than enough from imagining proving them wrong. I reserved all of my spite for the people I called my friends.

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When I first ran across the Pick-Up Artist community it seemed like it was just a bunch of people tossing around truisms that I’d picked up over the years. That’s the funny thing about the internet. There are all kinds of people who have all kinds of ideas and they generally present said ideas in such a way as to seem pretty reasonable.

So when I first ran across the idea that the way to get women was to treat them like shit it made a certain amount of sense. The logic was fairly inescapable. It’s common knowledge[1] that chicks dig bad boys, after all. So the idea of finding a woman, treating her like shit, and thereby getting her attention and lovin’ made a certain amount of sense.

I didn’t pay that much attention, though, because being a jerk to get my own ends really wasn’t that high on my list of things to do.[2]

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Eventually I realized that the PUAs were basically a sub-set of the Mens’ Rights Activist groups and those guys were self-evidently assholes. I also realized that there was a specific and familiar air of resentment that fueled both groups. I recognized it because, well, it was a message that resonated with me.

See, when you’re the socially maladjusted nerd you wait for those moments that offer you validation. The best person to provide that validation is the most attractive girl you can find. If you date the most attractive girl in your class it must mean that you’re cool, right?[3]

If you pay attention to how the PUAs and MRAs talk about what they do (and, y’know, who they did it to) it’s obvious that they literally do not give a shit about women. All they’re doing is making sure they can brag in front of the other guys. This is the irrevocable mark of the guy who is still smarting from rejection and doesn’t know any healthy ways to deal with it. So he takes it out on someone else.

If anyone then tells him he’s being an asshole about the whole thing he resorts to bullying. It’s that same high school locker room level of bullying, too. The PUAs will say that anybody who criticizes them must be an inferior specimen of manhood. Or gay. Or a quisling trying to curry favor with women who will never sleep with them.

It’s pathetic, really.

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The only way to defeat resentment is through a combination of self-sufficiency and empathy. I believe that resentment and empathy are opposing forces. The tie breaker in the tug of war between the two is how the person making the choice views him- or herself. If you’re confident in who you are it’s much easier to choose empathy. Empathy requires vulnerability and powerlessness to function. Resentment covers up vulnerability and trades powerlessness for the feeling of power that comes from lashing out and causing pain to others.

Resentment, in short, allows a form of bullying. It’s why one of the common responses of the bullied is to become a bully. It’s much easier if you’re the sort who overcomes some bad thing to then see that same quality in another and resent them for it or to see people who you believed could have helped you escape it but didn’t and resent them for not taking action.

Resentment, in short, is a gateway to hatred. That’s why it’s the opposite of empathy. And we’re going to talk about that next time.

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[1]”Common knowledge” and “accurate notions about reality” are often non-overlapping magisteria, after all.

[2]Being a jerk in general, though, is always an option. As is being a jerk for the lulz. What’re ya gonna do?

[3]This, I’m convinced, is the source of all of the TV shows and movies and whatnot where the big, fat, selfish slob is dating/married to the hot chick in spite of the fact that all the slob seems to have going for him is a long-suffering companion and (generally) a sense of humor. Although I will say that the trope got subverted in Superbad between Emma Stone and Jonah Hill. That one at least set up Jonah Hill as the loveable loser who managed to learn how to not be a selfish slob. I think.